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So, to sum up, from 2005 to 2012, the UK had a scheme (always love that word, neutral in most British dialects but delightfully menacing in American English) for certain repeat offenders where you would be sentenced to a minimum with no designated end date, just when the parole board thought you were sufficiently rehabilitated, though you remained on parole indefinitely as well.
When it was revoked, because "life but with the possibility of parole after two years" is a pretty bizarre idea and a palpably insane sentence for anything short of various homicide and sexual assault charges, it was only going forward. They didn't retroactively cap the prisoners' sentences.
I'm an American. Our system is, on the whole, obviously much worse, tragically worse, but this seems like an oddly Dickensian nightmare in a country that's generally much more humane, though still struggling with a weird sort of muscularly classist paternalism.
I've lived in a couple of countries in Europe including the UK and the idea that the system in Britain is generally humane is pretty naive.
The Justice System in Britain is to a very large extent a tool to Keep People In Their Proper Place and like the Political system and other Power systems over there, the end result of uninterrupted centuries of maybe the most classist mindset in the whole of Europe and one of the lowest levels of social mobility in the continent.
Absolutelly, if you are wealthy or well connected the system will be very "humane" for you and if you're Middle Class you'll probably be alright. Poor people ... well ... as long as they only harm other poor people (or foreigners) they might be alright (hence the phenomenon of Hooliganism), otherwise the book will be thrown at them.
There really is quite the extraordinary "some people are inherently superior to other people" mindset going on in there and that's reflected in the uneveness of the treatment given to people by the Justice System and the exceedingly cold and extremelly punitive sentencing reserved for "lesser" people.
The style of violence of the various British Power Systems reflects the style of violence of the Posh Elites: nothing so crude as physical violence involving guns, rather complex rule structures designed with enough flexibility to on one side let the "right people" through and on the other crush the "wrong people" in their machinery, as well as goon-like police force compose of people from a working class background who see themselves as above the common working class and can thus often behave with that very special kind of cruel obedience found in those who both think they're now better than the place from where they came, yet fear they might fall back if they don't execute their orders with gusto.
You do understand that's not what he wrote. Right?
Like, do you get that it was a nightmare system in contrast with a society a little more humane than America? (A bit of a low bar)
Re-read my post.
It's not a significantly more humane society, it's just inhumane in different ways than America and the Justice System there reflects that.
A system designed to slowly crush the less well off that "don't know their place" for the rest of their lives might seem more humane than one were the police will just shoot them (especially if having the "wrong" skin color) but in terms of hurt inflicted the former might very well be worse than the latter because it's basically lifelong torture. Also read all about Britain's past: they got rid of Slavery and a few years later reinstated it as Indentured Servitude (and tell everybody they were the first country to outlaw Slavery, which is a pretty typical example of the local way in which bad things are just rebranded, not stopped and the rebranding is shamelessly used for image polishing purpose) plus had things like Workhouses all the way to the XX century - the Edwardian Era Britain (the real deal, were household servants were supposed to turn to the wall and look away when the master of the house was passing, not the hyper beautified version of British period series and movies) never got torn down by Revolution or anything similar, it just got buried under extra layers of social norms and a relentless cultural push to rewrite the common perception of it via deceitfully portraying it (such as in the above mentioned period series and movies).
The cruelty in such a system is much harder to spot than in the bloody police violence you see in America (and it's so by design) so people outside Britain tend to have quite a rosy view of the place, which is only natural until you figure the culture and forms of the English upper classes not just in their exercise of power and authority but in the way they interact with the "lower" classes and even each other. Hence my use of the word "naive" (as in naive about Britain, rather than generally naive) which I expected to be not insulting (I supposed I could've used "interesting" or "curious", and Brits would definitelly have got the implied insult).
You can add to that a very unhealthy admiration for the USA